Ericsson CEO Borje Ekholm is reportedly considering relocating its headquarters from Sweden to the US, as he gave a strong indication the company will continue to shift investments away from Europe.
Ekholm told Bloomberg in an interview Europe is falling behind and lawmakers in the continent must prioritise consolidation and reduce regulation to improve the situation.
“The natural conclusion of that is we’ll be shrinking in Europe and growing in North America,” he said.
Ekholm continued to state that the question of officially relocating to the US is a recurring topic, and while Ericsson has deep ties in Europe, it needed to take a wider view of what the world will look like in the future.
“Would we relocate at some point in time? That could well happen.”
Beat the Chinese
In a wide-ranging interview, Ekholm also said US sanctions on Huawei had proven ineffective and the Chinese company remains its biggest competitor. Ericsson is attempting to outdo competition through R&D, as well as investments around open RAN.
Indeed, the company made major inroads in the open RAN space in the US, securing a $14 billion contract with AT&T at the end of 2023.
The executive acknowledged an open RAN approach may lead to more competition for Ericsson in the broader sense but added that a “horizontal platform” is “the way for us to actually beat the Chinese”.
As well as open RAN, Ekholm said he expects its network API business to generate revenue in the next one or two years.
The Swedish vendor made a big play around APIs in 2022, spending $6.2 billion to acquire cloud provider Vonage Holdings. However it has since taken around a $4 billion hit on the value of the unit in total, due to lower anticipated market growth.
Ekholm admitted Ericsson had “dropped the ball” and “lost focus” on Vonage’s core, but it is now more intent on executing its business plan.
